Lords of the Sunset Strip

Book excerpt: 'I did a double take when I saw fourteen-year-old Drew Barrymore at the bar, drinking with the Bukowski crowd. She was adorable, spoke with a potty mouth and carried on as if she was in her twenties. I was straining to approach her but backed off. I’d been in enough trouble. The next time I looked she was gone. A couple nights later she reappeared and in the same spot at the middle of the bar, entertaining the bartender. I pulled the trigger this time, and whatever I had to say she bought.' "I'm eating your book! It's delicious!" Lia Mack - Portland, Oregon "Fervent shades of Jack Kerouac.” Terry Wells - Brigg, England “Lords of the Sunset Strip” is the brutally honest and hilarious memoir of actor and writer Blackie Dammett—AKA John Kiedis—who happens to be the father of Red Hot Chili Peppers frontman Anthony Kiedis. Set mostly in Hollywood but with multiple national and worldwide excursions for film shoots, love affairs and drug deals, this tell-all provides an unexpectedly candid look at an actor’s transition from a wild man with a dream to a sensitive if unconventional parent with a dream. And of course, there were the women. New girls were always replenishing the scene. Dammett towed his young Red Hot Chili Pepper with him through a torrent of sex-fueled parties, auditions and business deals in Hollywood, New York and London. It’s an exhilarating, exhausting and romantic journey. It had a profound and ineffable influence on Rock & Roll Hall of Famer Anthony. “Lords of the Sunset Strip” will no doubt have a similar influence on its readers as well. It’s simply the biggest, baddest, boldest tale of Hollywood and Rock & Roll ever written.